We were flipping through channels and caught some of “To Catch a Predator” on TV and got to wondering about something. Are there actual 13 and 14 year old girls chatting about sex to grown men on the internet and setting up meetings? Or are virtually all of them cops or other men? I’ve been old for awhile and freely admit I’m mostly unfamiliar with the practices of young girls nowadays. I puzzled about where to place this question, so if this is the wrong forum, a mod can feel free to move it. Any thoughts? Is this sort of thing common?
Well, it seems like there must have been at some point, or there would be no such predators in the first place. Can’t have predators without prey.
When I was 14 or so I was a rampant little cyber-slut. I only ever made plans to meet one or two guys, because we’d gotten to talking outside of cyber sex and they’d told me they were my age or around there, but you never know.
Hell, at 17 I became friends with a guy I’d met online who was 21 and moved out of home to live with him in another state for two and a half years. Not quite the same as the 14yo/adult male situation, but yeah… It’s out there.
I don’t think there’s quite as many as the media would have you think, but then they don’t report on all the 14 year olds that just sit at home and talk to other 14 year olds.
But, I believe we’ve had at least one or two threads here about someone’s daughter or niece meeting up with a much older man on the internet.
I think it used to happen a lot more then it does now. Back in the day, all you had to go on was a chat transcript and maybe a few pictures you emailed back and forth. Now it’s much easier to learn about someone from pretty small pieces of info. If you have a first name and a city you can often times dig up a facebook profile. If you have a full name, it’s easy to fine a police record. If you have their address, you can find pictures of their house and car. If you have a screenname, especially if it’s unique, you can find message boards they’ve posted too.
On the other hand, all this means is that the victims tend to be even more naive then they used too. 15 years ago, you might go to meet someone knowing full well that it could turn out to be someone you’re not expecting, and you were prepared for that. Nowadays, if you don’t know that that’s a possibility, you’re probably the type of person that can be easily manipulated.
Having said that, I think this thread is about young teen females knowingly entering into relationships with much older adult males. Sure that happens, no it’s not a good thing, but I don’t think it’s as rampant as the media would lead you to believe. I also don’t think it’s the internet’s fault. It’s the mindset of the victim. I think some of these victims, if they didn’t get picked up on the internet, would probably be the same people we hear about dating/sleeping with their teachers or babysitters or friend’s dads.
What Joey said. When I was 14, I was chatting with guys in a particular chatroom. We could email pics back and forth, but there was no facebook, no myspace, no linkedin or any other way to find out details about someone without having serious chops in things like IP tracking and so on.
But yes. There are 14yo girls who willingly will get into relationships with older men. Especially if that guy is spending hours a day hanging on her every word, making her feel like the most mature, most intelligent, most special woman he’s ever known. And 14yo girls aren’t exactly known for their critical thinking skills in terms of “Why is this man chasing a 14yo girl?”. She’s thinking “Wow, a 25 year old guy thinks I’m really mature for my age and really loves me”
The Salt Lake City Tribune ran a series about how teen girls were actively engaging older males to buy them things. Basically they’d be trading sex for stuff.
And to some degree it makes sense. Some children are products of abuse, so it would make sense for them to at least get something back from it. If a father or uncle is abusing his daughter, said daughter can at least get something buy finding an old guy to buy her something. In a way she’s making a sucker of him and getting even for the abuse, in a round-about way
The problem is teens often don’t realize the level or meaning of their flirtations. Teen girls can be flirtatious. They don’t really understand the consequences of it.
One of my favourite Kate And Allie shows it where the two girls answer a personal ad, just to see what the guy would look like. Since they can’t meet him in real life they send in a fake picture and go to meet him and get a gander at him.
I realize TV isn’t life, but it shows you how a simple little thing can easily get out of hand.
A lot of the time it’s not even material things that the younger girls are trading sex(ual contact) for. Sometimes it’s something as simple as I mentioned above. At 14 you’re starting to come into who you are going to be as a woman. You feel different from your friends. Boys of your age are still (predominantly) young retards. You feel like nobody understands you.
Along comes a grown up! Everything you say is interesting to him. He tells you you’re beautiful when you’re feeling awkward and gangly. He tells you you’re intelligent. Mature. Well-spoken. You’d give anything to keep getting that attention, to feel special like that. And some girls do.
when i was 14, roughly a decade ago, i would sometimes troll the internet for chicks and i always told them i was 17-18. then after about 8 months of doing this, i felt really creeped out by how EASY it was to get nudie pics from these girls and decided that i had crossed some moral threshold and decided to stop. my buddy didn’t and ended up with multiple “online gf’s” who thought they were “dating” a “17 year old semi-pro snowboarder”. so, yes. there are chicks out there definitely willing to at least snap pictures if not more… and that was back at the turn of the millenium where digital images were a big to-do (some chicks were scanning pictures). now? i wouldn’t be surprised if it had grown exponentially. i mean, how much underaged nudity must there be on chatroulette alone?
There are real life examples of everything you can imagine in this world that could conceivably be possible. It only comes down to the actual numbers involved. I don’t know the actual numbers in this case but there have been a few cases of near misses with young teen girls running off with much older internet lovers in New England in recent years so it does happen. You hear about the ones that get caught early on but not those that don’t.
I even know the family and friends of a worst case nightmare in Louisiana. He was a 12 year old boy who was cyberchatting with a ‘teenage girl’ who wanted to meet up that night while he was away at a slumber party. She sent a cab to pick him up. Little did he know that the ‘teenage girl’ was the cab driver, a convicted sex offender who proceeded to has his way with him and murder him in short order. It sounds like an urban legend, but sadly it is not.
There is no reason to hide behind your bed with a shotgun every night but the cyberworld does present some new twists on old threats that people should be aware of.
Thanks to all. It is just amazing to me how the guys on the show go running off to meet these “girls” - some are even caught more than once. It made me wonder how many times they have actually been able to meet up with kids for real.
Is TCAP even still on? The only episodes I’ve seen have been reruns from Pre-2000. Both predators and potential prey were a lot more naive back then.